Google top MediaGuardian 100

Google ranked number one by MediaGuardian

The founders of leading search engine Google have been awarded the number one spot in this year’s prestigious MediaGuardian 100.
After creating the search engine ten years ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have beaten tough competition to take first place in the industry’s annual guide the most powerful people in the media. The ranking, now in its eight year, reviews all sectors of the media, including advertising, marketing and digital media.

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Glossary

Glossary

Actual cost-per-click (CPC)

This is the amount you’ll actually pay for a click on your ad.

Ad ranking/Positioning

A keyword-targeted ad’s position is based on its ad rank, which is determined by your keyword or ad group’s cost-per-click (CPC) bid times the matched keyword’s Quality Score

Affiliate

An affiliate is an individual advertiser or website owner who has a business relationship with a merchant to promote the merchant’s product or service.

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the number of conversions divided by the number of ad clicks.

Cost per action (CPA)

Your cost-per-action, or CPA, is the current amount that you are willing to pay for a specific action to be completed on your site. This cost generally varies depending on product and on type of action. You set your own fixed CPA for each action when you create a pay-per-action campaign.

CPC

The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you pay each time a user clicks on your ad.

Google AdSense

oogle AdSense is for web publishers who want to make more revenue from advertising on their site while maintaining editorial quality.

Google AdWords

Google’s advertising program based on cost-per-click pricing.

Impression

The “Impr” located on your reporting statistics refers to the number of “impressions” for your ad. The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed.

Keyword

The keywords you create for a given ad group are used to target your ads to potential customers.

For example, if you deliver fresh flowers, you can use ‘fresh flower delivery’ as a keyword in your AdWords campaign

Landing Page

An active webpage where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘clickthrough URL.’

Optimisation

Optimisation is the process of modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads. 4Ps: Marketing can assist you in this process.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

The pricing structure used by some online channels to charge an advertiser each time a user clicks on the advertiser’s ad. The amount is usually set by the advertiser, not by the channel. Also called cost-per-click (CPC).

Quality Score for Google and the search network

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it’s calculating minimum bid or ad position:

Quality Score for the content network

Quality Score for the content network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your ads. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your ad is to a particular page in the content network. The higher an ad’s Quality Score, the more likely it is to appear on a content page and the higher its position will be.

ROI

Return on investment (known as ROI) is the ratio of the cost of advertising relative to the profit generated from conversions such as sales or leads. Your ROI indicates the value to your business gained in return for the cost of your ad campaign.

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.

SEM

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Sources: en.wikipedia.org and google.co.uk

Google AdWords gambling ban

Google has recently (October 2008) removed its ban on advertising gambling sties through its PPC advertising platform Google AdWords. This is a huge turnaround from the search engine giants and at the time of writing Betfair, Galacasino and PKR hold the top 3 spots for the search term “poker site”. more ›››

Big changes at Yahoo!

Steve Butterfield a co-founder of photo-sharing website Flickr has become the 4th senior executive to resign at the search engine Yahoo! within the last few weeks. Other top execs to resign include Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse, and Vish Makhijani. more ›››

AOL UK partner with Russell Grant

AOL, UK have partnered with Russell Grant to launch a new horoscope channel. The channel allows you to gain daily, weekly and monthly horoscopes through video. It is a good example of how search engines are increasingly offering content instead of just finding content as in the past. Such partnerships are now common among the search engines and analysts predict the trend to continue. more ›››